1. Technical Field
The invention is related to the manipulation of digital images which are displayed on a display screen, where the term “digital images” refers to digital photographs, digital video, panoramas, 3D virtual environments, and any other type of digital imagery. More particularly, the invention is a system and process for creating an interactive image that allows a viewer to interact with a displayed image thereof so as to cause the displayed image to change with regard to a desired effect such as exposure, focus and color.
2. Background Art
Technological progress in digital photography is typically measured by how well a digital photograph compares against its analog counterpart. Digital cameras are marketed as being more convenient and less expensive in the long term than analog cameras, but little else. The end goal is still the same—to shoot a still photograph.
Recently, some efforts have been made to do things with digital photography that are difficult or impossible with analog photography. Many digital cameras now come with a capacity to do a “sports shot” or to shoot short video clips. Some digital camera software comes equipped with image-stitching capabilities that allow one to create larger panoramas sewn together from smaller, overlapping images of the same scene. Thus, in addition to static imagery, current digital photography allows the creation of sequential video by capturing a sequence of images of a scene over a period of time, or a panoramic image by capturing a sequence of standard-sized images of a scene at varied pan and/or tilt orientations. However, none of these digital photography techniques can be called interactive. A person viewing the resulting image, panorama or video does just that—views it. This viewer cannot, for instance, interact with the image on a viewing screen to vary the focus or exposure of all or a portion of the image to better discern what is depicted in the image.
Granted, certain handcrafted graphical user interface effects have been incorporated into digital images. For example, some graphics-intensive web pages implement so-called “discoverable” links as a mouseover effect. In these web pages, when a cursor passes over a linked graphical icon, the icon displays itself differently in such a way as to draw the attention of the viewer. While such images might be termed interactive, it is noted that it is the graphical icon the viewer is interacting with, not the image. Further, the construction of an image with discoverable graphical links results in only specific locations being interactive. The user can only interact with the graphical link sites and not any portion of the surrounding image.